08 December 2015
The pharmaceutical sector is one of the most highly regulated in the world. Quanticate therefore needs to ensure complete data integrity.
Quanticate will use software from Commvault to ensure availability and compliance with global legislation for all its electronic data assets.
Headquartered in the UK and US, Quanticate is a clinical research organisation (CRO). It is primarily focused on the management, analysis and reporting of data from clinical trials and post-marketing surveillance.
As the pharmaceutical sector is one of the most highly regulated industries in the world, the organisation needs to ensure complete data integrity throughout its period of custody as well as retaining all study data in an accessible form for a minimum of 15 years after a trial ends.
Prior to the Commvault implementation, Quanticate faced excessive backup windows and a fragmented recovery processes, causing complexity and time costs. Combined with rapid data growth, the organisation decided to review its data management strategy before it impeded the potential to expand.
Commvault claims its software’s source-side deduplication capabilities significantly reduce bandwidth needs during backup or recovery. It says this makes data transfer much more cost efficient, reducing average backup times by approximately 75 per cent.
The deployment of the solution has given Quanticate a single platform, as well as more efficient backup, recovery and archiving. Commvault says it also negated the need for couriers to transfer off-site backups between primary and DR sites, substantially reducing RTOs.
Quanticate CIO James Mackellar says ensuring the integrity and management of customer data is a key differentiator for the organisation’s business as a data-focused CRO.
“The combined de-duplication, compression, archiving and accessibility capability that Commvault provided us meant that from a business perspective we can prove our compliance quicker, with greater visibility for our clients and hence do more business,” says Mackellar.
“Information security and compliance is imperative to our clients’ success as well as our own. Our data management strategy reflects our commitment in this area supported by a complete ISO 27001 compliant Information Security Management System.”
Commvault says the organisation also now has the functionality to prepare for a cloud-based business continuity strategy to be developed in the future.
In the short-term, Quanticate plans to take further advantage of the opportunities that cloud has to offer, such as the potential for hybrid data centre and private cloud strategies.
Commvault says by being able to seamlessly migrate data and VMs without compromising security or data backup, Quanticate will be able to develop dynamic capacity planning with confidence.
The vendor adds that it also enables the use of secure, encrypted cloud storage locations for long-term data retention rather than having to invest in an ever-growing storage network. Further resilience is possible by using multiple cloud providers in the future.
“Being able to rehearse disaster recovery in the cloud for example, could provide considerable cost savings,” says Mackellar. “Whilst we are still in the exploratory phase with regards to this use case for cloud services, it is reassuring that our Commvault solution can facilitate this and significantly reduce our sunk costs in idle hardware.”
